Another accent anecdote: An old friend of mine lived in Brazil for many years, starting when with a work-study program when she was in college and stayed and made it her home. Brazil has many regional accents, when she would travel about the country people never thought she wasn’t a native Brazilian, just that she was from some other part of the country. I’ve heard many of the Brazilian accents over the years. I can barely understand spoken Portuguese and I can only tell that a couple of the most distinctive accents are off from what I’m used to but the natives can tell, and often tell what other countries Portuguese speakers are from.
Even Patrick Stewart’s accent is not his original one. It’s been RADA-ised. He is quite happy to explain this, but I saw an interview where he was asked to try his original accent, and just can’t anymore, at least spontaneously. He is skilled enough that with concentration and drill he could recover it as a matter of conscious effort, but he does not have any longer the easy access to his native accent that we all take for granted.
maybe someone can explain this to me: I was watching the new Prime Suspect series and at one point, I think she was asked why she became a policewoman, because she had a “posh” accent (implying that she could’ve gotten any number of jobs). I hadn’t paid attention to the character’s accent at that point and even now I just remember it to be “British” although some of her fellow officers had more distinctive accents . A later scene in the same episode showed her home life in Maida Vale, the family sitting around watching tv and it seemed to be typical middle-class, not what I’d call posh. I think of posh as being upper class.
Does posh just mean anyone who is not working class?
“Posh” is relative. It’s anyone of a higher social class than the person employing the word “posh”. To a working-class person, middle-class people are posh.
In the context, “posh” means “of a higher social class than that from the the police force stereotypically recruits”.
Thanks. And I just realised I’ve never given any thought to how/where the police recruit.
Traditionally in the UK it was a very enter-at-the-bottom-and-work-your-way-up profession. The police recruited school leavers, they started as cadets, received training, became constables and then started climbing up the greasy pole through sergeant, inspector and so on, potentially to the dizzy heights of chief constable.
Nowadays it’s more flexible, and they do have graduate recruitment schemes and schemes for recruiting people with management experience, but I think the culture of the force is still very much that entry at the age of 18 or so is seen as the norm, and other entry routes are considered innovative.
I would say Police leadership was often recruited from the middle classes.
One thing which has always fascinated me, certain jobs always mark you as middle class, regardless of background. A detective was one of them. Also, Doctor, Barrister or Army Officer. For others, you retained your class.
This fact always makes me chuckle when I hear people complain about Picard’s accent.
The main complaint I know of with his accent is that it isn’t French.
Point is, people say that its unrealistic that Picard* had an RP accent, when the actor himself was employing something that was not his original accent**; ergo Picard might have been made/encoruaged to drop his regional accent in favour of something more neutral. This has been done in real life militaries, hell the British Army accent is a thing.
*Stewart had no problem using a French accent, but the producers found it ridiculous.
** He was also hardly the only one to use a different accent than his original on the show, Frakes, Spiner, MacFadden all either had different or softened accents. In DS9, when Dorn used his original accent (in a couple of episodes) he sounded very different from Worf. Why does Patrick Stewart get grief.
I’ve always been very well-spoken and am frequently mistaken for a British person, so I make some effort to cultivate an “educated” British-like accent. I travel a bit on business and find sounding like I work for the BBC means A) People can understand me and B) Tend to assume I know what I’m doing.
I made a conscious choice to avoid a “Fush and Chups” NZ accent, but people from NZ can generally pick that’s where I’m originally from.
Not gonna disagree with your point, but I will address your footnotes.
My understanding of the first one is that they thought Stewart’s accent was to comical, and that’s why it was ridiculous. They did originally want someone with a French accent, but Stewart was so good they decided to drop it.
I don’t think Americans tend to notice shifts in American accents so easily. I’m not even sure you’re right. I know that Sirtis did an accent. Maybe MacFadden. But I’d call what Spiner did just a different voice, and Frakes sounds exactly the same to me. I also think of what Dorn does as more of a voice than an accent.
And what “grief” I’ve heard about Picard’s accent is about the character, not the actor. People object that he was still a Frenchman with an RP accent. Or, at the very least, they want an explanation, in-universe and out-, of why.
(In universe, there’s the fact that French is an uncommon (possibly dead) language in the future, and then character reasons why he might not want to keep the same accent as the rest of his family. In real life, it’s what you said in your first footnote.)
Huh? Sure, Spiner isn’t doing Texas Jewboy, but Frakes could easily be from Pennsylvania and MacFadden does a fine Cuyohoga Falls accent. Basically, they sound suburban.